Animation Basks in Oscar Spotlight

LOS ANGELES — At one minute 45 seconds, with credits, “Fresh Guacamole“ is the briefest film ever nominated for an Oscar. It’s a stop-motion short in which that popular avocado dish is remade with different ingredients, starting with a grenade in place of the avocado. The short, made by an animator known as PES, is a sequel of sorts to “Western Spaghetti,” a stop-motion recipe of pickup sticks pasta and Rubik’s cube garlic. It’s the first film PES, born Adam Pesapane, submitted for Oscar consideration, a process that presented some challenges for a filmmaker whose work usually lives on YouTube.

“You have to jump through some hoops” to get a theatrical screening, as required by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Mr. Pesapane said in an interview on Tuesday from his home in Santa Monica, Calif. The film, commissioned by Showtime, had its premiere before “The Artist” at a Hollywood theater last year and was programmed by the Laemmle Theaters, an art-house chain here. Despite its brevity and deceptively simple concept the short took four months, upward of $50,000 and a team of technical experts to create. “The guys who did ‘The Dark Knight Rises,’ the Bane mask, painted all the stuff for this film,” Mr. Pesapane said.

With a career as a commercial director, Mr. Pesapane, 39, who is working on a feature-length project or two — an adaptation of the Garbage Pail Kids series may get off the ground first — said he hoped the Oscar nomination for his micro-opus would help him gain Hollywood momentum. Thanks to a recent rule change this year the entire membership of the Academy is invited to vote on entries in the short-film categories. (The Oscar-nominated shorts, animated and live action, open theatrically on Friday.)

“You can’t get any higher award for making short films, let alone minute-and-40 second films,” PES said. In place of the usual “For Your Consideration” ads that studios run touting their films, he and his wife and collaborator, Sarah Phelps, had another slogan idea: “For Your Amusement.”

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“ParaNorman” joins two other stop-action Oscar nominees.Credit
Focus Features

While no one was looking, this year’s Oscars have become a hotbed for animation lovers. For starters an animator, Seth MacFarlane, a creator of “Family Guy” and “The Cleveland Show,” is hosting the ceremony on Feb. 24. There are 5 nominees for best animated film — usually there are three — reflecting a record 21 such features up for consideration this season. (There were also more contenders in the shorts categories.) Collectively the full-length Oscar hopefuls have made more than $542 million at the box office, mostly thanks to Pixar/Disney’s “Brave,” a rebel princess story with a bow-and-arrow-shooting heroine, and “Wreck-It Ralph,” a pop culture mash-up of retro video games and cartoons. The other three nominees are done in stop-motion, an old animation form that rarely crops up so frequently in one year.

“When we did ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ in 1993, a stop-motion feature was pretty much unheard-of,” said Tim Burton, whose “Frankenweenie,” using the same technique, is a nominee this year. It is based on a live-action short he made in 1984, when he was briefly an animator at Disney. “Though even in the ’80s Rick Heinrichs,” his production designer, “and I pitched it as a stop-motion film,” Mr. Burton wrote in an e-mail. “It seemed the perfect medium for the feature. There’s something tangible and so beautifully textured about stop-motion. I’ve always loved it.”

And Mr. Burton helped inaugurate a generation of artists: Chris Butler worked on “Corpse Bride” (directed by Mr. Burton and Mike Johnson), a nominee in 2006, before going on to write and co-direct “ParaNorman,” another stop-motion nominee this year. Though the stop-motion films earned a fraction of the ticket sales of their fully digital compatriots, their triple recognition acknowledges “the craftsmanship and the art that goes into these things,” Mr. Butler said. “We always say it’s like making a live-action movie in miniature at a glacial pace.”

In a joint phone interview on Tuesday, Sam Fell, the other director of “ParaNorman,” about a boy who can communicate with ghosts, added that “quite often it’s the stop-motion movies that are more out there,” adding, “They’re a little quirkier, they’re a little harder to pin down.”

“Frankenweenie” is a horror-inspired take on a boy who reanimates his dead dog, with gleefully, ghoulishly Burtonian results. Mr. Burton said that film is “about how people question the value of science and art in this world, the creative mind in general, and accepting someone who thinks differently.”

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“Fresh Guacamole,” a nominated animated short, is by PES.Credit
PES

Another nominee, “The Pirates! Band of Misfits,” directed by Peter Lord, is a resplendently silly tale that joins Charles Darwin, Queen Victoria and a formally clad chimp on the high seas.

With “ParaNorman,” “Frankenweenie” and “The Pirates! Band of Misfits” in production at roughly the same time, there was even a shortage of stop-motion experts. “We had to find a whole bunch of people, the next generation even, young people who just made a short film in their bedroom,” Mr. Fell said. “It really grew the community this year.” With the lengthy production process, “one movie in this medium is long enough for someone to really progress from being very inexperienced to having a real handle on the medium,” he said.

Since the animated feature category was introduced at the Oscars for 2001 productions, the Academy’s short film and feature animation branch, which includes career cartoonists as well as designers and filmmakers, has regularly included stop-motion and hand-drawn fare — the work on which many in the field cut their teeth. The nominees are chosen by a volunteer group of 100 to 125 Academy members, half from the animation branch and half not, who must watch at least three-fourths of the eligible films, all on the big screen, said Jon Bloom, a governor and the chairman of the branch. This has led to some grumbling that the committee is a self-selected group, perhaps retirees, whose tastes might skew to the pre-computer graphics era.

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“The category is likened to foreign film and best picture, meaning that what we’re instructed to vote on is the entire achievement,” Mr. Bloom said. “We’re not voting on the best animation but the best animated film in its totality, and that means story and performance and animation and everything.”

The feature winners are chosen by the Academy over all. The animation industry’s version of the Oscars, the Annies, will be handed out on Saturday; all five Oscar nominees are contenders there too, with other studio films like DreamWorks’ “Rise of the Guardians” and Sony Pictures’ “Hotel Transylvania.” “Brave” won the Golden Globe for animation but awards watchers are split on whether it, “Frankenweenie,” “ParaNorman” or “Wreck-It Ralph” lead the field at the Oscars. Clark Spencer, the producer of “Wreck-It Ralph,” whose art direction spans the evolution of video games, from the earliest eight-bit to the complex digital multiplayers today, said that as audiences have been primed by all different styles of animation, they are eager for more, whether that is a retro stop-motion look or a cutting-edge 3-D scene. “You tell a great story, but people always want to know what’s going to be unique about it visually,” he said.

And the Academy, Mr. Bloom said, is acutely aware of the role that blockbuster animated films play in the telecast. That’s why the award is usually presented early during the ceremony. “The Academy is hoping to get interest in the Oscars from young viewers who may be going to bed soon afterward,” he said, “trying to indoctrinate a new generation.”

A version of this article appears in print on January 31, 2013, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Animation Basks In Oscar Spotlight. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe